Sports of The Times; University President Noticed for His Absence

By WILLIAM C. RHODEN

Published: February 7, 2004

YESTERDAY, for the second time in two months, members of the news media were summoned to St. John's to hear the university's spin on the latest scandal in its basketball program. Players were expelled and suspended in the wake of an embarrassing escapade at a club near Pittsburgh.

The casualty count was extensive: one player expelled, two more expected to be expelled, two indefinite suspensions and one suspension for tomorrow's game against Boston College in Madison Square Garden.

But the inescapable contradiction of the afternoon was apparent as soon as the news media were ushered in to conduct interviews. We were directed to the President's Room at Alumni Hall, but there was no president.

Where was the Rev. Donald J. Harrington?

I asked the same question in December, when we were summoned to hear the spin on the sudden, ill-timed and -- in retrospect -- wrong-headed firing of Coach Mike Jarvis. Where was Harrington? He hired Jarvis with so much pride and joy, but was nowhere to be seen or heard when Jarvis walked the plank.

Harrington has been the president of St. John's since 1989, but has been unable to get his arms and ego around the men's basketball program. The enterprise has been the university's golden goose since 1979, when Big East basketball began and the TV money began pouring in.

St. John's was a city college built on city kids. The facilities were out of date, but Lou Carnesecca was charming and the program was winning and it flew just under the New York radar because New Yorkers and the sports media were obsessed with the Giants and the Jets, the Knicks and the Nets, the Yankees and the Mets, the Devils, the Rangers and the Islanders.

But sometimes things just jump up and smack you -- like a group of basketball players from a religious institution having sex with a woman after an out-of-town loss, in the midst of a disastrous season two months after their head coach was fired.

And no Harrington.

The basketball program is going through the most depressing spell in its history, facing its darkest moment, and the president is out of town, leaving all the questions in the hands of his young athletic director and an assistant coach turned interim head coach.

There comes a time when a university president has to step up, not just to face news media music, but to address the broader problem the university faces. Instead, the president sends a lieutenant and a sergeant to explain how a group of players under their charge wound up in a predicament like this.

In a way the university is lucky. What would have happened had the players been harmed?

We wouldn't be talking about mere expulsions.

Would Harrington still be incognito? It is easy to show up for the good times, for the big victories and the happy hirings, then leave your staff to explain the losses.

''You need to be very careful with athletics,'' Msgr. Robert Sheeran, the president of Seton Hall, said yesterday, although he made it clear he was not talking specifically about St. John's. ''Intercollegiate athletics is the bridge that links the ivory tower to ordinary people. That's a very, very powerful vehicle.''

Sheeran had his own potential nightmare with Eddie Griffin, who spent a season at Seton Hall, then left and is disintegrating before our eyes.

''The media is not going to call me about a student who didn't do well academically,'' Sheeran said. ''But a basketball player who punches someone or a basketball player who does something bad, they'll be on my case. Often the name and the reputation will be besmirched, so you need to watch that very, very carefully.''

Harrington has watched, all right. He cut short a trip to Florida to come back to New York, will meet with reporters today and will be at the game tomorrow. That's all well and good, but he wasn't here yesterday.

St. John's should cancel the rest of its schedule. If the president does not come to that conclusion, the board of trustees should. The university should cancel the rest of the season and reassess the mission and focus of a program in distress.

Of course, there is no way that will happen. The eight St. John's players will battle on in what the university is spinning as a heroic gesture to save the ship. In fact, St. John's, which played its first season in 1907-8, needs to take the rest of the season off. Clearly, the mission is not having players at Club Erotica at 2:30 a.m.

Since 1989, Harrington has dismissed three head coaches and pushed out two athletic directors. He will reach a total of four head coaches after Kevin Clark, who was appointed interim coach in the wake of Jarvis's firing, is not retained while Harrington again attempts to lure a big name to coach at St. John's.

Throughout the news conference yesterday, Athletic Director David C. Wegrzyn insisted that the club incident was not a failure on the part of the coaching staff or the athletic administration, taking himself, the president and the coach off the hook. Instead, he said, the players' actions were ''out of line with behavior becoming St. John's students.''

But the university does have staffing problems, and those problems apparently begin at the top.

Photo: The Rev. Donald J. Harrington, the president of St. John's, is expected to meet with reporters today. (Photo by Rebecca Cooney for The New York Times, 2001)(pg. D5)